Eat Pure was chosen as Wildsight Golden’s climate champion for the month of June. Every month Wildsight Golden’s Climate Action taskforce elects a new climate champion based on initiatives they are doing in the community to reduce their carbon/ecological footprint.
Nicole Du Vent, the owner of Eat Pure, answered a few questions about what her business is doing in regards to this.
Eat Pure is taking big steps to reduce their waste. For instance all of their food that is past prime gets discounted, juiced or made into soup, and then either composted or fed to animals. They also recycle all plastics, glass and cardboard.
They help reduce packaging by offering bulk food and refillable liquids and offering paper bags and glass jars for filling. They also use compostable containers in their café and use ecological cleaning products for store cleaning.
Eat Pure runs a community composting program that takes in compost from the public every Thursday and Friday. This program helps fill a void in the community because there is currently no composting program in Golden offered by the city.
Eat Pure also makes monthly donations to Wildsight.
In regards to what they would like to do to reduce their carbon/ecological footprint further, Nicole says Eat Pure would like to find more ways to reduce their power consumption. This presents a challenge as they need to run freezers and refrigerators for their food. Nicole says they would be interested in running solar to help run cooling systems in the summer but the upfront cost is too high to be practical for them.
In regards to what they would like to see other businesses in town do in regards to reducing their carbon footprint, Nicole says they would like to see other stores/restaurants aim for zero food waste. A good way to do this is by discounting older products before they go to waste like Eat Pure does. They can also join a food recovery program like LOOP (Save On is apart of this program that feeds old food to farm animals). They would also like to see other businesses switch to compostable takeout containers.
When asked why it is important to have stores like Eat Pure in town, Nicole says people in the community should be able access a wide variety of local, healthy organic food from local, provincial and Canadian producers. Businesses like Eat Pure give people an option to go waste-free by giving them an alternative to the grocery store, which tends to have more packaging from its products and less bulk/refillable options. Eat Pure also provides an outlet for local producers who are not large enough to work with a large supermarket.